Why the Blackhawks Won and Canada Is Doomed

Last night’s hair-raising, hockey-love-reaffirming, last-minute Stanley Cup victory by the Chicago Blackhawks over the Bruins, running on the amazing dual motor of Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, encourages me to do something that no sane man would normally do, and that is to argue statistics with Nate Silver. Woe always awaits the man who sets himself up to argue with Nate! The right-wing, “skewed polls!” boys who tried last fall all ended up on the ash heap of history, or fell suddenly silent, like poor Josh Jordan. So I stayed quiet when, not long ago, Silver wrote a piece arguing that the reason no Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since my Canadiens did in 1993 (you recall: Patrick Roy, John LeClair, Marty McSorley’s stick… well, I do, and I wasn’t even on the continent) is that there is less pressure on those teams to win big.

The argument runs that, as Toronto particularly has shown for almost fifty years, those Canadian teams will sell out just by showing up on the ice, and so the market pressure on them to win championships is reduced. For American teams, which are competing for the entertainment dollars of fans easily turned toward basketball or even soccer, not to mention baseball and football, the urgency of excellence (to sound a bit like Bill Walsh) is much greater. Ergo, American teams spend more (well, spend more cagily, given the salary cap) and strive harder to win Cups, while Canadian teams can afford to coast. Silver writes: “…there is so much excess demand for hockey in Canada that the Canadian franchises do not have to field especially strong teams to sell out their stadiums or to make a considerable profit.” A classic market-based explanation.

As I say, I am reluctant to match my feeble statistical non-knowledge with Silver, but I think that his account needs some supplementing, and I think the Hawks victory shows why. The truth is that, when it comes to Canadian teams, at least in the case of Montreal and Toronto, there is indeed enormous pressure—but not necessarily pressure to win Cups. The pressure they feel is not to fall below a certain level of mediocrity. A Habs or Leafs team that was really terrible, finishing last and far out of the playoffs year after year, really would be the object of contempt and rage on the part of their fans and city, rather than just the indifference that bad N.H.L. teams earn in the States. So the Canadian teams, it seems to me, end up struggling just to stay decent.

The cost of this effort is that they very rarely are in position to get top-five, or even top-ten, draft picks—and as the Hawks victory reasserts, Cups are won, by and large, by teams with superb young forwards, almost always taken very, very high in the draft. In plain English, the Canadian organizations can’t afford to tank. They have to field a competitive team, and fielding a competitive team, in today’s N.H.L., is a barrier to fielding a great one.

This isn’t just a random hypothesis. Studies showthat the value of a top-five pick in the N.H.L. is wildly, disproportionately greater than that of any other, lower picks, even lower first-round picks. Essentially, all the rest of the top hundred are “roughly equivalent in value.” If you have a top-five pick, you have a shot at greatness; anything below, and it’s very hard to get there.

If you think about it for a moment, of course, common sense confirms statistical analysis. The Blackhawks are, by recent standards, a relatively deep team—but there’s no question that they run on that double motor of Kane (first over all in 2007) and Toews (third over all in 2006). Take those guys away, and they don’t compete for the Stanley Cup, much less repeat as champions. The Penguins, similarly, have run these past few years on the double motor of over-all first and second picks Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. The Bruins, meanwhile, traded Phil Kessel to the Leafs to take Tyler Seguin second over all in 2010—and, indeed, despite Seguin, in the end the Bruins didn’t have an answer for the high-pick speed and skill of the two Hawks forwards. The trade confirms the pattern: rather than wait the necessary few years to let the high pick develop, and lose badly while they did, the Leafs felt pressure to produce something now, and went for Kessel. The pattern seems to hold over the past ten years. (Of course, there are exceptions—but the exceptions are essentially the Devils.) Obviously, not every top-three pick plays for a Stanley Cup winner. But it is very hard to find a Stanley Cup winner in the post-lockout era without at least one very high draft pick, and usually several.

Stanley Cups are not won by goalies, who, in statistical fact, tend simply to mirror the defensive skills of their team. (See the Brodeur is a Fraud Web site.) Stanley Cups, it seems, are won largely by teams with brilliant young forwards, and you get brilliant young forwards by finishing at the very bottom of the league several years in a row. The Leafs and Habs, at least, can’t afford to do that, and so they are always going to languish a little. (As a Habs fan, the most exciting thing to have happened in years is the emergence of their recent, once-in-a-generation, number-three-over-all Alex Galchenyuk—the difference between his skill level and that of the other talented kids the team has drafted in recent years is stunning. But the Habs finishing low enough to pick him was a full-fledged scandal in Montreal, and cost both the G.M. and coach their jobs. That was the lesson any future Habs G.M. would take from it, too: finish last, and get lost.)

The good thing about this dispute is that it can be resolved by a very simple test case. The Edmonton Oilers, over the past few years, have been the one Canadian team that really has tanked—and the Edmonton Oilers, over the past few years, have taken, in the top five picks in the draft, a trio of brilliant young forwards: Taylor Hall (first over all in 2010), Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (first over all in 2011), and Nail Yakupov (first over all last year). If I’m right, then the Oilers should be the next Canadian team to win a Cup, and soon; if the Oilers don’t return to greatness, pronto, then this theory will be shown to be utterly, completely wrong. That’s what makes it science, comrades.

Photograph by Bruce Bennett/Getty.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.